Marshall McLuhan   1911-1980

Arnold Toynbee—influence on McLuhan

Many of McLuhan's sweeping statements are taken from Arnold Toynbee, whose A Study of History vol 1 came out in 1934, when McLuhan was 22, and Toynbee's long series of books had some popularity, though this faded with time. Toynbee is credited here and there by McLuhan, rather cautiously, probably to avoid seeming old-fashioned. Toynbee appears thirteen times in the illustrative extracts I made. It seems likely he's not credited where he might have been. At any rate, the date is right. An obvious point, but kept silent.
      A L Rowse, Lewis Mumford and a few other historians (Gibbon, perhaps) are in there, but Toynbee seems to have provided most of McLuhan's background except perhaps for Catholic attitudes.
      Toynbee liked the idea of civilisations collapsing; his model collapse seems to have been the Roman Empire. He looked forward to many centuries of collapse, as a precursor to Christianity! This view may be shared by Jews too.

From Eustace Mullins Biological Jew:   'A second explorer of this ground was Arnold Toynbee, a donnish Englishman. {In fact, the name and publicity suggest Jewishness -RW.] He was equally reluctant to face the omnipresent and distasteful fact of the biological Jew. He embarked upon a vast study of civilization, which covered essentially the same ground as Spengler, and added little to Spengler's findings. His sole original contribution was a theory which immediately became popular with the intellectual lightweights of the time, since it conformed to their own prejudices. It was cast in the accepted pseudo-sociological jargon which university nitwits employ to bemuse their students and each other.
      Civilizations fall, declared Toynbee, because of a "failure of nerve"; at some point in its development, a civilization, which lives by a system of "challenge and response", fails to respond to some challenge, and goes down before it.
      Now, this could refer to the biological Jew, since the parasite is a challenge to the continued threat of the host. However, it is a challenge which no gentile host has ever been prepared to meet. It is a germ which is best defeated by inoculation, or by personal cleanliness and careful attention to matters of health.'

The period 1961-1962, when McLuhan was about 50, was captured quite well in Britain (apart from C P Snow) by Ved Mehta (including Arnold Toynbee and deals with the Jewish victory 15 years after the Second World War nominally ended.

And here's a piece by Arnold Toynbee, from 1970, assessing Bertrand Russell. The Jewish lies are painfully obvious, at least to me.

UNDERSTANDING MEDIA: THE EXTENSIONS OF MAN. Marshall McLuhan. 1964

Note: I was slightly fascinated by McLuhan's book for its intentional obscurity and its obviously missing links. I bought a copy many years ago, and wrote these notes many, but not so many, years ago. At the time I had little idea of the immense Jewish pressure on the world. I don't wish to pretend I saw through it at the time; these notes are more or less untouched. So don't assume I believe everything here - RW April 2023

[1] technically ignorant
printing doesn't include photos; up to 1900 no photos; then half tone. No colour till 1945 | film is photographic but movement add to photography | transport makes huge difference: shipping; steam ships; rail; roads and cars; air

[2] Idea that some change will or may be used for power
money and rent | paper money idea from china? | newspapers need intensive work | TV and film as propaganda not part of McLuhan (stuff about vague, woolly) | on weapons .... | on housing .... | on war...

- [Chapter 3, 'The Reversal of the Overheated Medium':] p 48: 'Julian Benda's Great Betrayal .. saw the artists and intellectuals who had long been alienated from power, and who since Voltaire had been in opposition, had now been drafted for service in the highest echelons of decision-making. Their great betrayal had been that they had surrendered their autonomy and had become the flunkies of power, as the atomic physicist at the present moment is the flunkey of the war lords. [But] .. it has always been the role of the intelligentsia to act as liaison and as mediators between old and new power groups. Most familiar.. is the case of the Greek slaves, who were for long the educators and confidential clerks of the Roman power. And it is precisely this servile role of the confidential clerk to the tycoon commercial, military, or political that the educator has continued to play in the Western world until the present moment. In England "The Angries" were a group of such clerks who had suddenly emerged from the lower echelons by the educational escape hatch. As they emerged into the upper world of power, they found that the air was not at all fresh or bracing. But they lost their nerve even quicker than Bernard Shaw lost his. Like Shaw, they quickly settled down to whimsy and to the cultivation of entertainment values.

In his Study of History, Toynbee notes a great many reversals of form and dynamic, as when, in the middle of the fourth century A.D., the Germans in the Roman service began abruptly to be proud of their tribal names and to retain them. Such a moment marked new confidence born of saturation with Roman values, and it was marked by the complementary Roman swing toward primitive values. (As Americans saturate with European values, especially since TV, they begin to insist upon American coach lamps, hitching posts, and colonial kitchenware as cultural objects.) Just as the barbarians got to the top of the Roman social ladder, the Romans themselves were disposed to assume the dress and manners of tribesmen out of the same frivolous and snobbish spirit that attached the French court of Louis XVI to the world of shepherds and shepherdesses. It would have seemed a natural moment for the intellectuals to have taken over while the governing class was touring Disneyland, as it were. So it must have appeared to Marx and his followers. But they reckoned without understanding the dynamics of the new media of communication. Marx based his analysis most untimely on the machine, just as the telegraph and other implosive forms began to reverse the mechanical dynamic.

The present chapter is concerned with showing that in any medium of structure there is what Kenneth Boulding calls a "break boundary at which the system suddenly changes into another or passes some point of no return in its dynamic processes." Several such "break boundaries" will be discussed later, including the one from stasis to motion, and from the mechanical to the organic in the pictorial world. One effect of the static photo had been to suppress the conspicuous consumption of the rich, but the effect of the speed-up of the photo had been to provide fantasy riches for the poor of the entire globe.

Today the road beyond its break boundary turns cities into highways, and the highway proper takes on a continuous urban character. Another characteristic reversal after passing a road break boundary is that the country ceases to be the center of all work, and the city ceases to be the center of leisure. .. improved roads and transport have reversed the ancient pattern and made cities the center of work, and the country the place of leisure and recreation.

Earlier, the increase of traffic that came with money and roads had ended the static tribal state (as Toynbee calls the nomadic food-gathering culture). Typical of the reversing that occurs at break-boundaries is the paradox that nomadic mobile man, the hunter and food-gatherer, is socially static. On the other hand, sedentary, specialist man is dynamic, explosive, progressive. The new magnetic or world city will be static and iconic or inclusive.

In the ancient world the intuitive awareness of break boundaries as points of reversal and of no return was embodied in the Greek idea of hubris, which Toynbee presents.. under the head of "The Nemesis of Creativity" and the Reversal of Roles." The Greek dramatists presented the idea of creativity as creating, also, its own kind of blindness, as in the case of Oedipus Rex, who solves the riddle of the Sphinx. It was as if the Greeks felt that the penalty for one break-through was a general sealing-off of awareness to the total field.

In a Chinese work The Way and Its Power (A. Waley translation) there is a series of instances of the overheated medium, the overextended man or culture, and the peripety or reversal that inevitably follows:
He who stands on tiptoe does not stand firm; | He who takes the longest strides does not walk the fastest... | He who boasts of what he will do succeeds in nothing; | He who is proud of his work achieves nothing that endures. ...

The endless reversals or break boundaries passed in the interplay of the structures of bureaucracy and enterprise include the point at which individuals begin to be begin to be held responsible and accountable for their "private actions." That was the moment of the collapse of tribal collective authority. Centuries later, when further explosion and expansion had exhausted the powers of private action, corporate enterprise invented the idea of Public Debt, making the individual privately accountable for group action. As the nineteenth century heated up the mechanical and dissociative procedures of technical fragmentation, the entire attention of men turned to the associative and the corporate. In the first great age of the substitution of machine for human toil Carlyle and the Pre-Raphaelites promulgated the idea of Work as a mystical social communion, and millionaires like Ruskin and Morris toiled like navvies for aesthetic reasons. Most bizarre of all the reversals in the great Victorian age of mechanization and high moral tone is the counter-strategy of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, which has proved exceedingly durable. While the Lord Cardigans were taking their blood baths in the Valley of Death, Gilbert and Sullivan were announcing that the boundary break had been passed.'

- [Chapter 4: The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis] p 52: 'Physiologically there are abundant reasons for an extension of ourselves involving us in a state of numbness. Medical researchers like Hans Selye and Adolphe Jonas hold that all extensions of ourselves, in sickness and in health, are attempts to maintain equilibrium. Any extension of ourselves they regard a "autoamputation," and they find that the autoamputative power or strategy is resorted to by the body when the perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the cause of irritation. Our language has many expressions which indicate this self-amputation that is imposed by various pressures. We speak of "wanting to jump out of my skin" or of "going out of my mind," being "driven batty" or "flipping my lid." And we often create artificial situations that rival the irritations and stresses of real life of real life under conditions of sport and play.'

- [Chapter 7: Challenge and Collapse: The Nemesis of Creativity] p 75: 'Toynbee is very generous in providing examples of widely varied challenge and collapse, and is especially apt in pointing to the frequent and futile resort to futurism and archaism as strategies of encountering radical change. But to point back to the day of the horse or to look forward to the coming of anti-gravitational vehicles is not an adequate response to the challenge of the motor car. Yet these two uniform ways of backward and forward looking are habitual ways of avoiding the discontinuities of present experience with their demand for sensitive inspection and appraisal. Only the dedicated artist seems to have the power for encountering the present actuality.

Toynbee urges again and again the cultural strategy of the imitation of the example of great men. This, of course, is to locate cultural safety in the power of the will, rather than in the power of adequate perception of situations. Anybody could quip that this is the British trust in character as opposed to intellect. In view of the endless power of men to hypnotize themselves into unawareness in the presence of challenge, it may be argued that will-power is as useful as intelligence for survival. Today we need also the will to be exceedingly informed and aware.

Arnold Toynbee gives an example of Renaissance technology being effectively encountered [sic] and creatively controlled when he shows how the revival of the decentralized medieval parliament saved English society from the monopoly of centralism that seized the continent. Lewis Mumford in The City In History tells the strange tale of how the New England town was able to carry out the pattern of the medieval ideal city because it was able to dispense with walls and to mix town and country. When the technology of a time is powerfully thrusting in one direction, wisdom may well call for a countervailing thrust. The implosion of electric energy in our century cannot be met by explosion or expansion, but it can be met by decentralism and the flexibility of multiple small centers. For example, the rush of students into our universities is not explosion but implosion...' ...

Had the Schoolmen with their complex oral culture understood the Gutenberg technology, they could have created a new synthesis of written and oral education, instead of bowing out of the picture and allowing the merely visual page to take over the educational enterprise...

Toynbee, in considering "the nature of growths of civilizations," not only abandons the concept of enlargement as a criterion of real growth of society, but states: "More often geographical expansion is a concomitant of real decline and coincides with a 'time of troubles' or a universal state both of them stages of decline and disintegration."

Toynbee expounds the principle that times of trouble or rapid change produce militarism, and it is militarism that produces empire and expansion. The old Greek myth which taught that the alphabet produced militarism ("King Cadmus sowed the dragon's teeth, and they sprang up armed men") really goes much deeper than Toynbee's story. In fact, "militarism" is just vague description, not analysis of causality at all. Militarism is a kind of visual organization of social energies that is both specialist and explosive, so that it is merely repetitive to say, as Toynbee does, that it both creates large empires and causes social breakdown. But militarism is a form of industrialism or the concentration of large amounts of homogenized energies into a few kinds of production. The Roman soldier was a man with a spade. He was an expert workman and builder who processed and packaged the resources of many societies and sent them home. Before machinery, the only massive work forces available for processing material were soldiers or slaves. As the Greek myth of Cadmus points out, the phonetic alphabet was the greatest processer of men for homogenized military life that was known to antiquity. The age of Greek society that Herodotus acknowledges to have been "overwhelmed by more troubles than in the twenty preceding generations" was the time that to our literary retrospect appears as one of the greatest of human centuries. It was Macaulay who remarked that it was not pleasant to live in times about which it was exciting to read. [Note: Chinese proverb idea] The succeeding age of Alexander saw Hellenism expand into Asia and prepare the course of the later Roman expansion. These, however, were the very centuries in which Greek civilization obviously fell apart.

...

.. Toynbee checks out his hypothesis by testing it with the developments in Greek agriculture. When the enterprise of Solon weaned the Greeks from mixed farming to a program of specialized products for export, there were happy consequences and a glorious manifestation of energy in Greek life. When the next phase of the same specialist stress involved much reliance on slave labor, there was a spectacular increase of production. But the armies of technologically specialized slaves working the land blighted the social existence of the independent yeomen and small farmers, and led to the strange world of the Roman towns and cities crowded with rootless parasites.'

[Chapter 9: 'The Written Word. An Eye for an Ear'] - .. bookshelves.. the marks on the pages were trapped words.. .. during his more than two thousand years of literacy, Western man has done little to study or to understand the effects of the phonetic alphabetic [sic] in creating many of his basic patterns of culture.. Suppose that, instead of displaying the Stars and Stripes, we were to write the words "American flag" across a piece of cloth and to display that.. Perhaps this illustration will serve to suggest the change the tribal man experiences when he becomes literate. Nearly all the emotional and corporate family feeling is eliminated from his relationship with his social group. He is emotionally free to separate from the tribe and to become a civilized individual..

The Greek myth about the alphabet was that Cadmus.. [Note: what is this myth?] sowed the dragon's teeth, and they sprang up armed men. Like any other myth, this one encapsulates a prolonged process into a flashing insight. The alphabet meant power and authority and control of military structures at a distance. When combined with papyrus, the alphabet spelled the end of the stationary temple bureaucracies and the priestly monopolies of knowledge and power. Unlike pre-alphabetic writing, which with its innumerable signs was difficult to master, the alphabet could be learned in a few hours. .. Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power reminds us that the teeth are an obvious agent of power in man, and especially in many animals. Languages are filled with testimony to the grasping, devouring power and precision of teeth. .. Teeth are emphatically visual in their lineal order...

.. only alphabetic cultures have ever mastered connected lineal sequences as pervasive forms of psychic and social organization. The breaking up of every kind of experience into uniform units in order to produce faster action and change of form (applied knowledge) has been the secret of Western power over man and nature alike. That is the reason why our Western industrial programs have quite involuntarily been so militant, and our military programs have been so industrial. Both have been shaped by the alphabet...

.. The story of The Ugly American describes.. blunders.. visual and civilized Americans when confronted with the tribal and auditory cultures of the East. As a civilized UNESCO experiment, running water with its lineal organization of pipes was installed recently in some Indian villages. Soon the villagers requested that the pipes be removed, for it seemed to them that the whole social life of the village had been impoverished when it was no longer necessary for all to visit the communal well. ...

.. All the alphabets in use in the Western world, from that of Russia to that of the Basques, from that of Portugal to that of Peru [sic], are derivatives of the Graeco-Roman letters..

[Chapter 10: Roads and Paper Routes:] - .. The word "metaphor" is from the Greek meta plus pherein , to carry across or transport. In this book we are concerned with all forms of transport of goods and information, both as metaphor and exchange. Each form of transport not only carries, but translates and transforms, the sender, the receiver, and the message. The use of any kind of medium or extension of man alters the pattern of interdependence among people, as it alters the ratios among our senses.' [This latter claim criticised by Jonathan Miller]

.. Village and city-state essentially are forms that include all human needs and functions. With greater speed and, therefore, greater military control at a distance, the city-state collapsed. ... when Arnold Toynbee turns, in A Study of History, to a massive documentation of "the breakdowns of civilizations" he begins by saying: "One of the most conspicuous marks of disintegration, as we have already noticed, is ... when a disintegrating civilization purchases a reprieve by submitting to forcible political unification in a universal state." Disintegration and reprieve, alike, are the consequence of ever faster movement of information by couriers on excellent roads.."

... The Roman army as a mobile, industrial wealth-making force created in addition a vast consumer public in the Roman towns. Division of labor always creates a separation between producer and consumer, even as it tends to separate the place of work and the living space. Before Roman literate bureaucracy, nothing comparable to the Roman consumer specialists had been seen in the world. This fact was institutionalized in the individual known as "parasite," and in the social institution of the gladiatorial games. (Panem et circenses). The private sponge and the collective sponge, both reaching out for their rations of sensation, achieved a horrible distinctness and clarity that matched the raw power of the predatory army machine.'

[Chapter 11: Number. Profile of the Crowd:] .. p. 107: 'The Spenglers are tribally entranced men who crave the swoon back into collective unconsciousness and all the intoxication of number. In India the idea of darshan of the mystical experience of being in large gatherings [Note: Is this an Islamic idea and word?] stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Western idea of conscious values. .. Had Spengler taken the time to discover the origins of both number and Euclidean space in the psychological effects of the phonetic alphabet, The Decline of the West might never have been written. .. Spengler, as much as Hitler, had derived from radio a subconscious mandate to announce the end of all "rational" or visual values. .. like Pip in Great Expectations, Pip was a poor boy who had a benefactor who wanted to raise Pip to the status of a gentleman. Pip was ready and willing until he found his benefactor was an escaped convict...

p 111: .. The need was to have a sign for the gaps between numbers. It was not until the thirteenth century that sifr, the Arab word for "gap" or empty", was Latinized and added to our culture as "cipher" (ziphrium) and finally became the Italian zero . ...

[Chapter 14: Money. The Poor Man's Credit Card:] p 127: 'Money as a social medium or extension of an inner wish and motive creates social and spiritual values, as happens even in fashions in women's dress. .. Conformity to this fashion literally gives currency to a style or fabric, creating a social medium that increases wealth and expression thereby. Does not this stress how money, or any medium whatever, is constituted and made efficacious? When men become uneasy about such social values achieved by uniformity and repetition, doing for mankind that which mankind wants, we can take it as a mark of the decline of mechanical technology.

"Money talks" because money is a metaphor, a transfer, a bridge. Like words and language, money is a storehouse of communally achieved work, skill,and experience. Money, however, is also a specialist technology like writing...'

p 128: 'Nonliterate societies are quite lacking in the psychic resources to create and sustain the enormous structures of statistical information that we call markets and prices...'

[Chapter 20: The Photograph. The Brothel Without Walls:] p 180: 'A press photo of battered players in a 1905 (American football) game .. came to the attention of President Teddy Roosevelt. He was so angered .. that he issued an immediate ultimatum that if rough play continued, he would abolish the game by executive edict. The effect was the same as that of the harrowing telegraph reports of Russell from the Crimea...

.. the press photographer .. began to invade the entertainment spots of the very rich. The sights of men ordering drinks from horseback at the bars of clubs quickly caused a public revulsion...'

[Chapter 21: The Press. Government by News Leak:] p 183: 'In 1962, when Minneapolis had been for months without a newspaper, the chief of police said: "Sure, I miss the news, but so far as my job goes I hope the papers never come back. There is less crime around without a newspaper to pass around the ideas."'

[Chapter 24: Games, The Extensions of Man:] p 207: 'When the boys came home from the mud and blood baths of the western front in 1918 and 1919, they encountered the Volstead Prohibition Act. It was the social and political recognition that the war had fraternized and tribalized us to the point where alcohol was a threat to an individualist society. When we, too, are prepared to legalize gambling, we shall, like the English, announce to the world the end of individualist society and the trek back to tribal ways.

.. Philip Deane, in Captive in Korea, tells a story about games in the midst of successive brainwashings... There came a time when I had to stop reading those books, to stop practising Russian because with the study of language the absurd and constant assertion began to leave its mark, began to find an echo, and I felt my thinking processes getting tangled, my critical faculties blunted... then they made a mistake. They gave us.. Treasure Island in English... I could read Marx again, and question myself honestly without fear...

p 208: .. Latest fashion among Japanese businessmen is the study of classical military strategy and tactics... [Anthropology:] New Guinea tribes the Willigiman-Wallalua and the Wittaia, a people exactly like themselves in language, dress and custom.. Every week or two [they] arrange a formal battle... They fight because they enjoy it...'

.. The Olympic Games were direct enactments of the agon, or struggle of the Sun god. The runners moved around a track adorned with the zodiacal signs in imitation of the daily circuit of the sun chariot [sic; of course the sun stays in its sign in one day!]. The participation in these rituals kept the cosmos on the right track, as well as providing a booster shot for the tribe.

.. The games of a people reveal a great deal about them.. The Gamesmanship of Stephen Potter speaks of a social revolution in England. The English are moving towards social equality and the intense personal competition that goes with equality. The older rituals of long-accepted class behavior now begin to appear comic and irrational, gimmicks in a game. Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People first appeared as a solemn manual of social wisdom, but it seemed quite ludicrous to sophisticates.

p 211: ... Baseball is a game of one-thing-at-a-time, fixed positions and visibly delegated specialist jobs such as belonged to the now passing mechanical age... the elegant abstract image of an industrial society living by split-second timing...

p 212: In contrast, American football is nonpositional, and any or all of the players can switch to any role during play. It is, therefore, a game that is at present supplanting baseball... Russians.. devotion to ice hockey and soccer, two very individualist forms of game, would seem little suited to the psychic needs of a collectivist society. But Russia is still, in the main, an oral, tribal world that is undergoing detribalization..

Poker is a game that has often been cited as the expression of all the complex attitudes and unspoken values of a competitive society. It calls for shrewdness, aggression, trickery, and unflattering appraisals of character. ... It is in this perspective that it is easy to see why war has been called the sport of kings. ... For "play," whether in life or in a wheel, implies interplay. There must be give and take, or dialogue, between two or more persons and groups.

.. Perhaps there is a desperate need for games in a highly specialized industrial culture, since they are the only form of art accessible to many minds. ...

A comment on the different kinds of games played in the British Parliament and the French Chamber of Deputies will rally the political experience of many readers. [sic] The British had the luck to get the two-team pattern into the House benches, whereas the French, trying for centralism by seating the deputies in a semicircle facing the chair, got instead a multiplicity of teams playing a great variety of games...' [Note: This surely taken from Parkinson, since it has no American or Canadian reference which would surely be natural to McLuhan]

p 215: Flaubert.. felt that the Franco-Prussian War could have been avoided if people had heeded his Sentimental Education. .. Artists.. know that they are engaged in making live models of situations that have not yet matured in the society at large. In their artistic play, they discovered what is actually happening, and thus they appear to be "ahead of their time." Non-artists always look through the spectacles of the preceding age. General staffs are always magnificently prepared to fight the previous war.

Games.. are contrived and controlled situations, extensions of group awareness that permit a respite from customary patterns...

p 216: .. rigged TV quiz shows.. directors prosecuted as con men.. the riggers had been blithely unaware of the nature of their medium, and had given it the movie treatment of intense realism... Charles Van Doren merely got clobbered as an innocent bystander...'

[Chapter 25: Telegraph. The Social Hormone:] '1910.. Crippen.. Captain George Kendall of the Montrose and Marconi's wireless [Note: automatic attribution to Marconi]

p 217: .. Albert Speer.. at Nuremburg.. made some bitter remarks: "The telephone, the teleprinter and the wireless made it possible for orders from the highest levels to be given direct to the lowest levels, where, on account of the absolute authority behind them, they were carried out uncritically..."

p 219: One way to grasp the change from the mechanical to the electric age is by noticing the difference between the layout of a literary and a telegraph press say between .. The New York Times and the New York Daily News. It is the difference between columns representing points of view, and a mosaic of scraps in a field unified by a dateline.

p 220: It was in 1844 that Samuel Morse opened a telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore with $30,000 obtained from Congress. Private enterprise, as usual, waited for bureaucracy to clarify the image and goals of the new operation. ..No new technology, not even the railroad, manifested a more rapid growth than the telegraph... By 1858 the first cable had been laid across the atlantic, and by 1861 telegraph wires had reached across America.

p 221: Any innovation threatens the equilibrium of existing organization. In big industry, new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.. It is comical, therefore, when anyone applies to a big corporation with a new idea that would result in a great "increase of production and sales." [Note: idea that novelty starts, and MUST start, in small organizations. Why does he believe this?]

p 222: In the same year, 1844, .. Soren Kierkegaard published The Concept of Dread. The age of Anxiety had begun. With the telegraph, man had initiated that outering [i.e. uttering?] or extension of his central nervous system that is now approaching an extension of consciousness with satellite broadcasting. [Note: I wonder if he knows what a 'nervous system' is? I feel he perhaps believes it's something which makes people nervous!] .. we can turn to some specific instances of this uneasiness and growing jitters.. Aretino, the Scourge of Princes and the Puppet of Printing; [?who??] Napoleon and the trauma of industrial change; Chaplin, the public conscience of the movie; Hitler, the tribal totem of radio; and Florence Nightingale, the first singer of human woe by telegraph wire. ... She.. discovered the new formula for the electronic age: Medicare. [sic]

p 223: 'terrible winter of 1854-55. For the first time in history, reading the dispatches of Russell, the public had realized "with what majesty the British soldier fights." And these heroes were dead.. Alma.. Light Brigade at Balaclava..' (Lonely Crusader, Cecil Woodham-Smith) horrors relayed by wire.. with telegraph, came the integral insistence and wholeness of Dickens, and of Florence Nightingale, and of Harriet Beecher Stowe...

p 224: By 1848, the telegraph, then only four years old, compelled several major America newspapers to form a collective organization for newsgathering. This effort became the basis of the Associated Press, which, in turn, sold news services to subscribers...

[Chapter 26: The Typewriter. Into the Age of the Iron Whim:] .. Atlantic Monthly.. 1904.. '... typewriter has given a tremendous impetus to the dictating habit.. means not only greater diffuseness.. but it also brings forward the point of view of the one who speaks..'

p 228: .. when the first wave of female typists hit the business office in the 1890s, the cuspidor [Americanism for spittoon] manufacturers read the signs of doom. They were right. More important, the uniform ranks of fashionable lady typists made possible a revolution in the garment industry. What she wore, every farmer's daughter wanted to wear, for the typist was a popular figure of enterprise and skill. ... A modern battleship needs dozens of typists for ordinary operations. An army needs more typewriters than medium and light artillery pieces, even in the field... G.K. Chesterton demurred about this new independence [sic] as a delusion, remarking that "women refused to be dictated to and went out and became stenographers."

p 229: With Henry James, the typewriter had become a confirmed habit by 1907, and his new style developed a sort of free, incantatory quality. .. He became so attached to the sound of his typewriter that, on his deathbed, Henry James called for his Remington to be worked near his bedside.

Just how much the typewriter has contributed by its unjustified right-hand margin to the development of vers libre would be hard to discover, but etc in the manner of a jazz musician...

p 230: Most colloquial and jazzy of all Eliot's poems, Sweeney Agonistes, in its first appearance in print carried the note "From Wanna Go Home Baby?"

p 230: Typewriters caused an enormous expansion in the sale of dictionaries...

p 232: Electric power circuits, in relation to the same processing, eliminate both the assembly line and delegated authority ... The historian Daniel Boorstin was scandalized by the fact that celebrity in our information age was not due to a person's having done anything but simply to his being well known for being well known. Professor Parkinson is scandalized that the structure of human work now seems to be quite independent of any work to be done. As an economist, he reveals the same incongruity and comedy, as between the old and the new, that Stephen Potter does in Gamesmanship.

[Chapter 27: The Telephone. Sounding Brass or Tinkling Symbol?:] ..p 233: The New York Evening Telegram in 1904: "'Phony' implies that a thing so qualified has no more substance than a telephone talk with a suppositious friend." [NOTE: Could mean it leaves no legal evidence, as in Miller's play All My Sons]

James Joyce in Finnegans Wake headlined TELEVISION KILLS TELEPHONY IN BROTHERS BROIL, introducing a major theme.. With the telephone, there occurs the extension of ear and voice that is a kind of extra sensory perception. With television came the extension of the sense of touch or of sense interplay that even more intimately involves the entire sensorium.

The child and the teenager understand the telephone, embracing the cord and the ear-mike as if they were beloved pets. What we call the "French phone," the union of mouthpiece and earphone in a single instrument, is.. significant..

No more unexpected result of the telephone has been .. the elimination of the red-light district [Note: from a man living in Toronto, this is something of a joke!] and the creation of the call-girl. .. The prostitute was a specialist, and the call-girl is not. A "house" was not a home; but the call-girl not only lives at home, she may be a matron. ...

p 234: When he [the reader] has a chance to try the experiment deliberately, he will find that he simply can't visualize while phoning, though all literate people try to do so and, therefore, believe they are succeeding. .. Our habit of visualizing renders the literate Westerner helpless in the nonvisual world of advanced physics. Only the visceral and audio-tactile Teuton and Slav have the needed immunity for work in the non-Euclidean math and quantum physics. Were we to teach our math and physics by telephone, even a highly literate and abstract Westerner could eventually compete with the European physicists.

p 236: .. Alexander Graham Bell.. Visible Speech ... the Braille system had begun as a means of reading military messages in darkness, then was transferred to music, and finally to reading for the blind...

p 237: In the 1920s, the telephone spawned a good deal of dialogue humor that sold as gramophone records. But radio and the talking pictures were not kind to the monologue, even when it was made by W C Fields or Will Rogers. These hot media pushed aside the cooler forms that TV now brought back on a large scale. The new race of night-club entertainers (Newhart, Nichols and May) have a curious early-telephone flavor that is very welcome, indeed. We can thank TV, with its call for such high participation, that mime and dialogue are back. Our Mort Sahls and Shelley Bermans and Jack Paars are almost a variety of "living newspaper," such as was provided for the Chinese revolutionary masses by dramatic teams in the 1930s and 1940s. Brecht's plays have the same participational quality of the world of the comic strip..

The mouthpiece of the telephone was a direct outgrowth of a prolonged attempt beginning in the seventeenth century to mimic human physiology...

p 239: The two pilots of one Canadian jet fighter are matched with all the care used in a marriage bureau. After many tests and long experience together they are officially married by their commanding officer "till death do you part."

p 240: Delegated authority is lineal, visual, hierarchical. The authority of knowledge is nonlineal, nonvisual, and inclusive. To act, the delegated person must always get clearance [sic] from the chain-of-command. The electric situation eliminates such patterns; such "checks and balances" are alien to the inclusive authority of knowledge. Consequently, restraints on electric absolutist power can be achieved, not by the separation of powers, but a pluralism of centers. This problem has risen apropos of the direct private line from the Kremlin to the White House. President Kennedy stated his preference for teletype over telephone, with a natural Western bias. psychotic

p 240: .. September 6, 1949.. psychotic veteran, Howard B Unruh, in a mad rampage on the streets of Camden, New Jersey, killed thirteen people and then returned home. ... editor on the Camden Evening Courier looked up Unruh's name in the telephone directory...

[Chapter 28: The Phonograph. The Toy That Shrank The National Chest:]

p 245: The word "jazz" comes from the French jaser, to chatter. Jazz is, indeed, a form of dialogue among instrumentalists and dancers [sic] alike. Thus it seemed to make an abrupt break with the homogeneous and repetitive rhythms of the smooth waltz. In the age of Napoleon and Lord Byron, when the waltz was a new form, it was greeted as a barbaric fulfilment [sic] of the Rousseauistic dream of the noble savage... In our own century the arrival of jazz and ragtime was also heralded as the invasion of the bottom-wagging native...'

[Chapter 29: Movies. The Reel World:] p 250: 'On seeing Charlie Chaplin as The Tramp, the African audience concluded that Europeans were magicians who could restore life. They saw a character who survived a mighty blow on the head without any indication of being hurt. When the camera shifts, they think they see trees moving, and buildings growing or shrinking, because they cannot make the literate assumption that space is continuous and uniform... The African insistence on group participation and on chanting and shouting during films [sic] is wholly frustrated by sound track...'

p 254: Nothing is more congenial to the film form than this pathos of superabundance and power that is the dower of a puppet for whom they never can be real. This is the key to The Great Gatsby that reaches its moment of truth when Gatsby breaks down in contemplating Gatsby's superb collection of shirts...

p 257: President Sukarno announced in 1956 to a large group of Hollywood executives.. that he regarded them as political radicals and revolutionaries who had greatly hastened political change in the East. What the Orient saw in a Hollywood movie was a world in which all the ordinary people had cars and electric stoves and refrigerators...

[Chapter 30: Radio. The Tribal Drum:] p 259: 'The more earthy and less visual European cultures were not immune to radio. Its tribal magic was not lost on them, and the old web of kinship began to resonate once more with the web of fascism. The inability of literate people to grasp the language and message of the media as such is conveyed.. by sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld: '..It is often forgotten that Hitler did not achieve control though radio but almost despite it, because at the time of his rise to power radio was controlled by his enemies...' [p 262:] It was Hitler who gave radio the Orson Welles treatment for real.

p 260: There is a little poem by the German dramatist Berthold Brecht: 'You little box, held to me when escaping/ So that your valves should not break/ ...'

p 261: It is no accident that Senator McCarthy lasted such a short time when he switched to TV. Soon the press decided "He isn't news any more." Neither McCarthy nor the press ever knew what had happened....

p 262: Just prior to 1914, the Germans had become obsessed with the menace of "encirclement." Their neighbors had all developed elaborate railway systems that facilitated mobilization of manpower resources. Encirclement was a highly visual image that had great novelty for this newly industrialized nation. In the 1930s, by contrast, the German obsession was with lebensraum . [Note: discounts Jews, Soviets] This is not a visual concern, at all. It is a claustrophobia, engendered by the radio implosion and compression of space. The German defeat had thrust them back from visual obsession into brooding upon the resonating Africa within... ready access of the German and middle-European world to the rich nonvisual sources of auditory and tactile form that enabled them to enrich the world of music and dance and sculpture. Above all their tribal mode gave them easy access to the new nonvisual world of subatomic physics, in which long-literate and long-industrialised societies are decidedly handicapped...

p 265: .. practical jokers like Morton Downey at CBS [who undressed a sportscaster]

p 265: Radio created the disk jockey, and elevated the gag writer into a major national joke. Since the advent of radio, the gag has supplanted the joke...

p 265: Jean Shepherd of WOR in New York regards radio as a new medium for a new kind of novel that he writes nightly. ... The power of radio.. has gone unnoticed. So extraordinary is this unawareness that it is what needs to be explained...

p 266: Radio in 1916 and the Easter rebellion Irish rebels used a ship's wireless to make a diffused broadcast... in the hope of getting word to some ship that would relay their story to the American press.

[Chapter 30: Automation. Learning a Living:] p 300: 'A newspaper headline recently read, "Little Red Schoolhouse Dies When Good Road Built." One-room schools, with all subjects being taught to all grades at the same time, simply dissolve when better transportation permits specialized spaces and specialized teaching. At the extreme of speeded-up movement, however, specialism of space and subject disappears once more...

p 304: .. Marketing and consumption tend to become one with learning, enlightenment, and the intake of information. This is all part of the electric implosion that now follows or succeeds the centuries of explosion and increasing specialism. The electronic age is literally one of illumination. Just as light is at once energy and information, so electric automation unites production, consumption, and learning in an inextricable process. For this reason, teachers are already the largest employee group in the U.S. economy, and may well become the only group.

p 305: As unfallen Adam in the Garden of Eden was appointed the task of the contemplation and naming of creatures, so with automation. Is it not rather like the case of Al Capp's Schmoos? One had only to look at a Schmoo and think longingly of pork chops or caviar, and the Schmoo ecstatically transformed itself into the object of desire. Automation brings us into the world of the Schmoo. The custom-built supplants the mass-produced.'

[Chapter 31: Television. The Timid Giant:] p 269: 'On the Jack Paar Show for March 8, 1963, Richard Nixon was paared down and remade into a suitable TV image. It turns out that Mr Nixon is both a pianist and a composer. With a sure tact for the character of the TV medium, Jack Paar brought out this pianoforte side of Mr. Nixon, with excellent effect. Instead of the slick, glib, legal Nixon, we saw the doggedly creative and modest performer. ...

p 269: 'The adaptation of TV to processes, rather than to the neatly packaged products, explains the frustration many people experience with this medium in its political uses. An article by Edith Efrom in TV Guide (May 18-24, 1963) labeled TV "The Timid Giant," because it is unsuited to hot issues and sharply-defined controversial topics: "Despite official freedom from censorship, a self-imposed silence renders network documentaries almost mute on many great issues of the day." As a cool medium TV has, some feel, introduced a kind of rigor mortis into the body politic. It is the extraordinary degree of audience participation in the TV medium that explains its failure to tackle hot issues. Howard K. Smith observed: "The networks are delighted if you go into a controversy in a country 14,000 miles away. They don't want real controversy, real dissent, at home." For people conditioned to the hot newspaper medium, which is concerned with the clash of views , rather than involvement in depth in a situation, the TV behavior is inexplicable.

p 271: [experiment in Toronto, presumably in his Center for Culture and Technology, supposedly to test absorption of information provided by a lecturer, book, TV, and radio; each being supplied in straight lecture form, and again 'dramatized with many auditory and visual features.' The second time, 'radio stood significantly above television' when a quiz was applied to the students.]

[Reference I lost to Death of a Salesman at just the time when TV was killing salesmen, presumably by nationwide ads. Incidentally, in Britain, why hasn't there been 'Death of a Vicar', with broadcast Sunday services?]

.. TV will not work as a background. It engages you. You have to be with it.

p 272: .. Before TV, there had been much concern about why Johnny couldn't read. Since TV, Johnny has acquired an entirely new set of perceptions...

p 272: Raymond Burr, who plays Perry Mason, spoke to the National Association of Municipal Judges, reminding them that "Without our laymen's understanding and acceptance, the laws which you apply and the courts in which you preside cannot continue to exist." What Mr Burr omitted to observe was that the Perry Mason TV program, in which he plays the lead, is typical of that intensely participational kind of TV experience that has altered our relation to the laws and the courts.

p 279: Marilyn Monroe.. the great movie puppet who wed Mr Baseball and Mr Broadway...

p 280: With TV came the end of bloc voting in politics, a form of specialism and fragmentation that won't work since TV. Instead of the voting bloc, we have the icon, the inclusive image.

p 282: The meaning of the telegraph mosaic in its journalistic manifestations was not lost to the mind of Edgar Allan Poe. He used it to establish two startlingly new inventions, the symbolist poem and the detective story. Both of these forms require do-it-yourself participation on the part of the reader. By offering an incomplete image or process, Poe involved his readers in the creative process in a way that Baudelaire, Valéry, T.S. Eliot, and many others have admired and followed...

p 283: The paperback, especially in its highbrow form, was tried in America in the 1920s and thirties and forties. It was not, however, until 1953 that it suddenly became acceptable. No publisher really knows why. ... Since radio, and especially since TV, English and American literary critics have exceeded the performance of any European in depth and subtlety. The beatnik reaching out for Zen is only carrying the mandate of the TV mosaic out into the world of words and perception. ...

p 284: The removal of the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles was a portent in itself. Baseball moved west in an attempt to retain an audience after TV struck... The real ball fan is a store of statistical information about previous explosions of batters and pitchers in numerous games. [Note: cp. cricket, of course. Games like soccer, where there's a whole team, don't allow this sort of analysis] .. a game that belonged to the industrial metropolis of ceaselessly exploding populations, stocks and bonds, and production and sales records. Baseball belonged to the age of the first onset of the hot press and the movie medium. It will always remain a symbol of the era of the hot mommas, jazz babies, of sheiks and shebas, of vamps and gold-diggers and the fast buck. Baseball, in a word, is a hot game that got cooled off in the new TV climate, as did most of the hot politicians and hot issues of the earlier decade.

p 285: [cars:] Brigitte Bardot got into the news when it was discovered that she liked to drive barefoot in order to get the maximal vibration.

p 287: When Theodore White's The Making of the President: 1960 is opened at the section on "The Television Debates," the TV student will experience dismay. .. statistics.. White considers the "content" of the debates and the deportment of the debaters, but it never occurs to him to ask why TV would inevitably be a disaster for a sharp intense image like Nixon's, and a boon for the blurry, shaggy texture of Kennedy. ... ... Anybody whose appearance strongly declares his role and status in life is wrong for TV. Anybody who looks as if he might be a teacher, a doctor, a businessman, or any of a dozen things all at the same time is right for TV. When the person presented looks classifiable, as Nixon did, the TV viewer has nothing to fill in. ... Mr Khrushchev is a very filled-in or completed image that appears on TV as a comic cartoon. ... President Kennedy [sic] did not look like a rich man or like a politician. He could have been anything from a grocer or a professor to a football coach.

p 292: Jack Ruby shot Lee Oswald while tightly surrounded by guards who were paralyzed by television cameras. The fascinating and involving power of television scarcely needed the additional proof of its peculiar operation upon human perceptions.

p 293: .. Kennedy was an excellent TV image. He had used the medium with the same effectiveness that Roosevelt had learned to achieve by radio. ...

[Chapter 32: Weapons. War of the Icons:] p 294: [Starts with 'Russian girl' Valentina Tereshkova in orbit. Then sputnik or "little fellow-traveller".] The French phrase "guerre des nerfs" [= 'war of nerves'; also in sense 'money is the sinews of war'] of twenty-five years ago has since come to be referred to as "the cold war." It is really an electric battle of information and of images that goes far deeper and is more obsessional than the old hot wars of industrial hardware.

The "hot" wars of the past used weapons that knocked off the enemy, one by one. .. Electric persuasion works by dunking entire populations in new imagery. ...

[Claim in New York Times:] the British Labor Leader is here campaigning, and fairly soon John F. Kennedy will be over in Italy and Germany campaigning for reelection. .. If the cold war in 1964 is being fought by informational technology, that is because all wars have been fought by the latest technology available in any culture.

.. John Donne.. 'So by the benefit of this light of reason they have found out Artillery, by which warres come to quicker ends than heretofore...' The scientific knowledge needed for the use of gunpowder and the boring of cannon appeared to Donne as "the light of reason." .. abandonment of armor during the seventeenth century .. freed some metal supplies.. Back in the 1920s King Amanullah said.. after firing off a torpedo: "I feel half an Englishman already." .. "I hate war.. because wars make history, and I hate history."

[Stuff about gun barrel boring methods used for steam engines; gunpowder used like dynamite for missiles in trajectories waited for the coming of perspective.. nonliterates poor shots with rifles.. [he says].

p 296: literate American colonists were first to insist on a rifled barrel and improved gunsights. They improved the old muskets, creating the Kentucky rifle. It was the highly literate Bostonians who outshot the British regulars.... In the Marine Corps it has been found that there is a definite correlation between education and marksmanship..

[Lodestone and magnet; physics, as, in painting and sculpture, consists in giving up the idea of space]

In the Second World War the marksman was replaced by automatic weapons fired blindly in what were called "perimeters of fire" or "fire lanes." The old-timers fought to retain the bolt-action Springfield which encouraged single-shot accuracy and sighting. Spraying the air with lead in a kind of tactual embrace was found to be good by night, as well as by day, and sighting was unnecessary. At this stage of technology, the literate man is somewhat in the position of the old-timers who backed the Springfield rifle against perimeter fire. ... [Modern physics.. older oral societies of middle Europe.. new structures of opinion and feeling that result from [sic] instant and global information.. "points of view".. one at a time... electric structure of information movement.. visual bias.. base and model of mechanization.. locks minds and senses.. mechanical techniques we have long used as weapons.. In his Education Automation, R Buckminster Fuller considers that weaponry has been a source of technological advance for mankind because it requires continually improved performance with ever smaller means. [sic] "As we went from the ships of the sea to the ships of the air, the performance per pound of the equipment and fuel became of even higher importance than on the sea."

[More power with less and less hardware [sic] .. First half century 2 1/2 trillion dollars invested by subsidy of the warplane.. Historians have often tended to find that war produces nothing new in the way of invention [sic.. Peter the Great and Charles XII of Sweden.. the backward countries can learn from us how to beat us.. Russians had only to adapt their traditions of Eastern icon and image-building.. the city is a weapon [sic].. collective shield or plate armor, .. extension of our very skins.. Before the city there was the food-gathering stage.. psychically men now returned to the nomad state.. information-gathering and data-processing is global.. the globe itself can never be more than a village.. circumnavigation in the Renaissance gave men a sense of embracing and possessing the earth that was quite new.. weapons extensions of hands, nails, and teeth.. tools needed for accelerating the processing of matter.. new electric technology is... a extension of our nervous system, we now see all technology .. as a means of processing experience, a means of storing and speeding information... all technology can plausibly be regarded as weapons. Previous wars can now be regarded as the processing of difficult and resistant materials by the latest technology, the speedy dumping of industrial products on an enemy market to the point of social saturation. War, in fact, can be seen as a process of achieving equilibrium among unequal technologies, a fact that explains Toynbee's puzzled observation that each invention of a new weapon is a disaster for society, and that militarism itself is the most common cause of the breaking of civilizations. [Rome's militarism.. backward tribes.. atom bomb appears as a state of universal aggression.. threat to all who lack it.. competitive fury of the homogenized and the egalitarian pattern.. caste and class are techniques of social slow-down... fragmenting force.. unity of the human family.. politics and history must be recast.. Leslie Dewart in Christianity and Revolution .. As an instrument of policy, modern war has come to mean "the existence and end of one society to the exclusion of another." At this point, weaponry is a self-liquidating fact.'

[Note: on war, McLuhan says: p 34: 'Subliminal and docile acceptance of media impact has made them prisons without walls for their human users. As A J Liebling remarked in his book The Press, a man is not free if he cannot see where he is going, even if he has a gun to help him get there. For each of the media is also a powerful weapon with which to clobber other media and other groups. The result is that the present age has been one of multiple civil wars that are not limited to the world of art and entertainment. In War and Human Progress, Professor J.U. Nef declared: "The total wars of our time have been the result of a series of intellectual mistakes.."' (No further comment on this)

p 101: 'For three centuries Europe invested in America for its fish and its furs. The fishing schooner and the canoe precede the road and the postal route as marks of our North American spatial organization. The European investors in the fur trade naturally did not want the trapping lines overrun by Tom Sawyers or Huck Finns. They fought land surveyors and settlers, like Washington and Jefferson, who simply would not think in terms of mink. Thus the War of Independence was deeply involved in media and staple rivalries. Any new medium, by its acceleration, disrupts the lives and investments of whole communities. It was the railway that raised the art of war to unheard-of intensity, making the American civil war the first major conflict fought by rail, and causing it to be studied and admired by all European general staffs, who had not yet had the opportunity to use railways for a general blood-letting. War is never anything less than accelerated technological change. It begins when some notable disequilibrium among existing structures has been brought about by inequality of rates of growth. The very late industrialization and unification of Germany had left her out of the race for staples [note: i.e. raw materials] and colonies for many years. As the Napoleonic wars were technologically a sort of catching-up of France with England, the First World War was itself a major phase of the final industrialization of Germany and America. As Rome had not shown before, and Russia has shown today, militarism is itself the main route of technological education and acceleration for lagging areas. Almost unanimous enthusiasm for improved routes of land transportation followed the War of 1812. Furthermore, the British blockade of the Atlantic coast had compelled an unprecedented amount of land carriage, thus emphasizing the unsatisfactory character of the highways. War is certainly a form of emphasis that delivers many a telling touch to lagging social attention....

INDEX
- Addison 184 - Baudelaire 117,181 - Beckett, Samuel xi, 166 - Bibles 146 - Boorstin, Daniel 177, 232 - Bosch 149 - Boston's Immigrants, by Oscar Handlin 102, 103 - Butler 112, 165 - Canetti, Elias and German inflation, big numbers 134; 64, 124 - Carroll 149 - Cervantes 157, 249 - cummings, e e 230 - Donne 294 - Eliot, T.S. 138, 149 - Forster, E.M. 41, 159 - Fuller, Buckminster p 297 - Girard, André [French painter, lighting man] 122 - Hemingway 226 - Hopi indians 137 - Ibsen 228 - Joyce passim, eg 47,62,117,153,157,166,246, 249 - Jung 35 - Keynes 131, 132, 133 - Klee 65, 105 - Lamartine 184 - Life magazine 176 - Marvell 140 - Mead, Margaret 158 - Milton 140 - Mumford, Lewis, passim e.g. 136, 143, 164, 167, 168 - Muybridge, Eadward [misspelt] 165 - Parkinson 142, 231-232 - Pasteur 32 - Picasso 62,153 - Pope 149, 157 - Potter, Stephen 208 - Rabelais 157 - Rimbaud 181 - Rowse, A L 32; see comment after Snow, C P - Russell, ABC of Relativity p 290 - Sartre p xi - Shakespeare 65, 138, 139, 149, 159 - Shaw 165 - Snow, C.P. 32, on distinguished British government in 1930s; cp GROUPTHINK, below - Spengler 109 - Steele 184 - Swift 154, 157 - Synge J M 41 - Talbot, Fox 180 - Toynbee, passim 32 - Twain 226 - Veblen, Thorstein 180 - Vogue 176 - Walter Gropius 105 - Washington 101 - White, Lynn, Medieval Technology and Social Change 163 - Whitehead (somewhere) - Yeats 38, 46: poem 'Locke sank into a swoon..' see Miller, pp 106-107

NOTES:

-Joke: McLuhan doesn't seem to understand: 'nervous system' doesn't make you 'nervous'; information theory is only about technology of transmission; theory of games is little to do with games. Effects of fragmentation of knowledge, though important, not studied by him [Could add: dynamics, relativity, and after his time catastrophe theory and chaos theory; statistics and models and O.R.; personal computers; digital transmission; compact disks]; 'Africa' as though it's one tribal unit/ perspective; he may believe it really is straight/ fact of mass production of disks, tapes. Recordings as cp sheet music/ musical instruments/ microphone and crooning/ home movies/ video recorders/ pencil, pen, chalk, biro/ toilets/ food/ packaging/ 'Economy' is Greek for household

- Arabic wasn't printed until about start of 20 C (notes elsewhere for info)

- Doomsday book presented as example of 'doom', as name numb, by McLuhan; but other books of the same sort, e.g. tithe surveys etc not mentioned

- McLuhan didn't have tiny portable TVs, though I think he had portable audio tape recorders/ players

- Were they oral cultures in South America which Catholics exterminated and butchered.. and in Ethiopia where Italians invaded.. come to think of it, South Americans had writing: codexes and so on

Omits: credit, lending, mortgages, national debt etc. Only has money.

Omits: sex as a 'medium'

Omits microscope, telescope, chronometer. At a simpler level, omits stone, bronze, iron; glass; pottery; agriculture; modern machinery effect of car? What about effects of airplanes e.g. on discovery, surveying, war?

Includes: brothels, call-girls [Catholic inheritance?]

Jonathan Miller: McLuhan   (1971)

A Critique by a Jew

p 36: .. another Catholic, the anthropologist Mary Douglas...

pp 45-46: I'll Take My Stand and the deep south of the U.S.A. 'Although like most sophisticated advocates of the Old South, McLuhan had abandoned the historically unsupportable fiction of Dixie Noblesse, he substituted for it one that was equally wishful, suggesting that the South offered a splendid example of a society that shared its peculiar wisdom equally among all its members: '.. there is not the split between the educated and "uneducated" which occurs in an atomized industrial community... there is not the familiar head-heart split of the North...' One cannot help wondering whether or not the Negro is supposed to be included...
      [After, see p 41, Scopes Monkey trial ridicule, and writers like Tate, Davidson, and Ransom .. 1928 Tate's Stonewall Jackson, The Good Soldier in which he maintained that the sense of concrete moral obligation which arose .. from direct ownership of land, and even of slaves, was infinitely superior to the abstract notion of right that plagued the politics of the idealistic north.
      And earlier, pp 23-24, American prairie life and the formation of Greenback parties etc]

pp 52-54: Memory methods and tricks: Miller traces them to two important treatises from classical antiquity, 'the anonymous Ad C. Herennium Libri IV and the De Oratione of Cicero.'

pp 64-65: .. Edgar Allan Poe.. great tradition of life and letters which he derived from the South of his day. .. a continuous force in European law, letters, and politics from the time of the Greek sophists. .. the Ciceronian ideal.. St Augustine and St Jerome ... noblest attainment in the expression of an eloquent wisdom. .. As Baudelaire recognised, Poe was the prototype of the aristocratic dandy the original fastidious flaneur ... Poe wrote a famous story that provided McLuhan with a highly specific metaphor of moral survival.. A Descent into the Maelstrom.. panic and despair.. scientific curiosity gets the better of his fear, and he notices that by studying .. the debris.. he can.. predict the action of the maelstrom...

pp 68-69: 'How could we be prompted to act against our choice without immediately knowing that we had been interfered with? Because, as Freud discovered, a certain proportion of our behaviour is already dictated by urges which we neither recognise nor control. If the unconscious can deliver its motives into consciousness in such a form that the individual acts upon them as if they were undertaken of his own free will, it is theoretically possible for someone with expert knowledge of the mind to programme the unconscious in order to influence the behaviour of a given subject without his necessarily feeling that he has been constrained in any way.'
      That is just what McLuhan believes has happened. By creating an elite class of psychological technicians we have inadvertently sold the franchise to our own unconsciousness.
      'Striving constantly .. to watch, anticipate, and control events on the inner, invisible stage of the collective dream, the ad agencies and Hollywood turn themselves unwittingly into a sort of collective novelist.. etc.. etc'

p 71: Dr Coué influenced by better and better ads. This is the Coué of "Every day in every way I'm getting better and better."

p 72: Orwell and blood and thunder stories in boys' magazines

p 75: In the fairy tale, .. as Chesterton pointed out, the ordinary laws of cause are suspended in favour of magical imperatives. 'In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened, and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten, and cities perish. A lamp is lit, and love flies away. A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited. An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone.' (Orthodoxy).

p 77: Wölfflin's Principles of Art History '1. The development of the linear to the painterly, i.e... the development of line as the path of vision and guide of the eye, and the gradual depreciation of line: ... 2. The development from the plane to recession. Classic art reduces the parts of a total form to a sequence of planes, the baroque emphasises depth. ...'

p 99: natives who note small differences in every tree...

p 101: .. strong visual emphasis in Homer and the relative absence of such imagery in the Old Testament. ... Edmund Leach's structural relationship analysis of Jepthah and Abraham Old Testament sacrifice stories.

pp 117-119: Joseph Needham: 'The Chinese physical universe in ancient and medieval times was a perfectly continuous whole.. Chhi condensed in palpable matter was not particulate.. Now it is a striking, and perhaps significant, fact that he languages of all those civilisations which developed atomic theories were alphabetic. .. the Chinese written character is an organic whole, a Gestalt, and minds accustomed to an ideographic language would perhaps hardly have been so open to the idea of an atomic constitution of matter. Nevertheless, the argument is weakened by the fact that the 214 radicals into which .. etc.
      In making the obvious comparison between Taoist organicism and Democritean-Epicurean atomism can we consider it a mere coincidence that the former arose in a highly organised society where conservancy-dictated bureaucratism was dominant, while the later arose in a world of city-states and individual merchant-adventurers? I believe that we cannot...'

p 120: Newton 'spent at least half his intellectual effort in constructing a magical system which even now proves a serious embarrassment to historians who would like to appropriate him to the pure scientific tradition.'

      He has also rather laboured scientific taking-apart of McLuhan's absurd ideas about the way senses interact, and so on